Like his father, evangelist Franklin Graham has a way with words. Unlike
Billy Graham, the 50-year-old son and heir is, in the words of a
Pittsburgh Post-Gazette editorial “a bit of a thrill seeker.” His sound
bites really chomp, and he rarely flinches when others denounce him as a
Christian chauvinist.

One month after the terrorist bombings of 9/11, at the
dedication of a Wilkesboro, N.C. chapel, Graham entered the lively debate
about whether Islam is a religion of peace or war. “We’re not attacking
Islam, but Islam has attacked us,” Graham asserted. “The God of Islam is not
the same God…. It’s a different God, and I believe it is a very evil and
wicked religion.”

That characteristic gem appeared almost immediately on
NBC’s “Nightly News” and has since bounced around the world more or less
continuously, usually condensed to the phrase “a very wicked and evil
religion.” This spring, it appeared in scores of newspaper articles and
broadcast pieces about Christian missionaries and the war in Iraq.

Accorded innumerable opportunities to retract or modify
his comments, Graham—unlike Jerry Falwell and some other conservative
Protestant leaders who have attacked Islam—has consistently declined to do
so. Indeed, he has progressively upped the rhetorical ante. “How come
the Muslim clerics haven’t gone to Ground Zero and had a prayer vigil and
apologized to the nation in the name of Islam?” Graham was quoted in a news
analysis by Robert Stacy McClain in the April 16 Washington Times.
“When people say (Islam) is a peaceful religion, don’t tell me that. When a
suicide bomber straps on a bomb, that’s not a peaceful person. The Baptists
are not doing that. Neither are the Pentecostals.”

Assertive evangelism when it comes to other faiths is
nothing new for Graham. In 1999, for example, he won few friends among
non-evangelicals when he used the forum of a state-sponsored memorial
service for those slain at Columbine High School to ask the 70,000 gathered
whether each of them had “trusted in Jesus Christ as their personal savior.”

During the first Gulf War, Graham infuriated Gen.
Norman Schwarzkopf with a project called “Operation Desert Save,” in which
his Christian relief agency, Samaritan’s Purse, “arranged for the shipment
of thousands of Arabic-language New Testaments to the troops in Saudi Arabia
to be passed along the locals,” Michelle Cottle wrote in the April 21 New
Republic. “The project was in direct violation of Saudi law and flew in
the face of an understanding between the United States and Saudi governments
to eschew proselytizing.”

Schwarzkopf ordered an Army chaplain to tell Graham
that the project was causing diplomatic problems. Graham responded: “Sir, I
understand that, and I appreciate that, but I’m also under orders, and
that’s from the King of Kings and Lord of Lords.” At least that’s what
Graham told Newsweek.

Over the course of this spring, Graham was at the
center of at least three significant stories covered by American
journalists. In April, he announced that Samaritan’s Purse had positioned
$500,000 worth of relief supplies and several staff members in Jordan
waiting to enter Iraq after the fighting ended. “We are there to reach out
to love them and to save them, and as a Christian I do this in the name of
Jesus Christ,” he told the website Beliefnet. The Southern Baptist
Convention’s relief arm also said it was ready to go into Iraq with a
similar mixture of aid and Good News.

That provoked an instant reaction from American
Muslims, as well as from many Christians who were unhappy to see relief and
evangelism tied so closely together. “Groups like Franklin Graham’s go in
and exploit vulnerable people under the guise of humanitarian relief,”
Ibrahim Hooper, a spokesman for the Council on American-Islamic Relations
told Carol Eisenberg of Newsday on April 27. “It will be perceived as
the U.S. government endorsing this activity, whether or not that’s the case.
And it will confirm suspicions in the Muslim world that this is really a war
against Islam.”

A second wave of stories focused on the ruckus over an
invitation to Graham to be the main preacher at a Good Friday observance at
the Pentagon. Muslim groups attempted, unsuccessfully, to get the invitation
revoked and Muslims working at the Pentagon protested Graham’s planned
appearance.

“You can’t say that Franklin Graham is a nut case on
the fringes of America when he’s the personal pastor of the president of the
United States and delivers Easter services at the Pentagon,” Muqtedar Khan,
a political scientist at Adrian College in Michigan told Newsday’s
Eisenberg in a story published May 13.

The Baltimore Sun covered the Good Friday sermon
with a story by Jean Marbella that emphasized the danger of Graham stirring
up trouble for the United States in the Muslim world. “He’s basically a red
flag,” said Louis Cantori, a University of Maryland, Baltimore County
political scientist and Middle East expert, “He is personally provocative.”

“It should be obvious to a worldly man like Franklin
Graham that his aggressive, proselytizing relief work would only fan the
flames of suspicion among those in the Muslim world all too eager to twist
this conflict into a crusade,” Jane Eisner complained in a Philadelphia
Inquirer column on April 24.

Many newspapers editorialized along the lines laid down
by the Washington Post on April 15. “If the Rev. Franklin Graham
wanted to play to role of Mother Theresa in Iraq, ministering ‘quietly’ to a
suffering people, as he wrote in a recent op-ed article in the Los
Angeles Times, he should have thought through the operation a little
more carefully. It’s hard to slip into a mostly Muslim country unnoticed
when you are the son of America’s most famous Christian evangelist, a friend
of the president—and, most to the point, a public figure who has called
Islam a ‘wicked’ and ‘evil’ religion, a ‘greater threat than anyone’s
willing to speak.’”

It’s no surprise that Graham has few fans on the
Washington Post editorial board, but the third cluster of stories arose
from a more intriguing source. On May 8, the leaders of the National
Association of Evangelicals and the Institute on Religion and Democracy, a
conservative Protestant public advocacy group based in Washington, condemned
assaults on Islam and said that they were drafting guidelines for interfaith
dialogue with Islamic leaders.

“We must temper our speech,” said the Rev. Ted Haggard,
president of the National Association of Evangelicals (NAE), which
represents more than 43,000 congregations, in an Associated Press story by
Rachel Zoll. “There has to be a way to do good works without raising
alarms.”

“As evangelical Christians, we disagree with Islam and
we are allowed to disagree, but how we disagree is important,” Clive Calver,
president of World Relief, the National Association of Evangelical’s relief
arm told a press conference.

As Zoll and others noted, this statement revealed, for
the first time, high-level disagreement among evangelicals about how to
address what is for them an absolutely fundamental question about how the
balance between relieving human needs and the Christian obligation to spread
the Gospel.

Graham has plenty of company among hardliners. “Jesus
didn’t say ‘Go into all the world where it is safe,” Newsday’s
Eisenberg quoted Fred Markert, executive director of Strategic Frontiers, a
Colorado Springs-based mission group. “He didn’t say ‘Go into all the world
where the food is good,’ He didn’t say ‘Go into all the world where they
invite you.’ He told his followers to go into all the world and share his
message.”

“Doesn’t the NAE have it backward?” snapped columnist
Cal Thomas on May 14. “The most incendiary language is not coming from
Christian leaders in this country, but from Muslim clergy overseas and
occasionally from Muslim pulpits and schools in the United States.”

But many mission-minded folk are worried that Graham
and other evangelical and fundamentalist hard chargers are generating
backlash against mission work, especially among Muslims. Calver of World
Relief, for example, told AP’s Zoll that superheated mission rhetoric has
“placed lives and livelihoods are risk.” In the past year, evangelical
mission workers have been assassinated in Yemen, Lebanon, and the
Philippines and churches attacked in Pakistan.

On January 30, a Fort Worth Star-Telegram story
(“Young Missionaries Worry Intemperate Words Can Hurt Them”) reported that
“27 student missionaries serving in 10 Muslim-dominated countries” had
signed a letter urging fellow Southern Baptists to “moderate their
criticisms of Islam and its founder because it hurts Christian evangelism
and endangers missionaries.”

As became clear this spring, over the past decade there
has been a massive resurgence in interest in mission to the Muslim world in
conservative Christian circles. Excellent pieces have been published in
recent months on this trend, including a June 30 cover story in Time,
and page-one analytical pieces by Newsday’s Eisenberg, Laurie
Goodstein in the New York Times, and John Rivera in the Baltimore
Sun.

Several trends seem to be converging. Along with a
strong reaction to 9/11, one of the most important is that the Muslim world
has replaced the fallen Communist block as the part of the globe perceived
as most hostile to Christian missionaries. That alone has made it the target
of extremely dedicated and zealous missionaries who are determined to
develop methods to circumvent the draconian prohibitions against Christian
missions common in most of the Muslim countries.

For example, the Indianapolis-based Arab International
Ministry is one of a large number of evangelical mission groups that has
been training thousands of American Christians over the past six years in
methods of proselytizing Muslims, Goodstein reported in an article headlined
“Seeing Islam as ‘Evil’ Faith: Evangelicals Seek Converts” in the Times
on May 27. In the same article she noted that Ergun and Emir Caner, Turkish
converts from Islam to evangelical Protestantism, have published books like
“Unveiling Islam: An Insider Look at Muslim Life and Beliefs,” which has
sold 100,000 copies among evangelicals.

Time’s David van Biema profiled “Josh,” a
24-year-old Assemblies of God missionary who works along in an Arab capital.
His evangelism is based on developing personal relationships with people and
providing personal assistance: “I would never do anything stupid like
blatant preaching on the street or going up to somebody I don’t know and
handing out literature.”

But the world is also full of virtually untrained young
Americans like the Texans Heather Mercer and Dayna Curry,” who became a
cause célèbre after they were arrested by the Taliban government in
August 2001 in Afghanistan. (See Dennis Hoover’s Spring 2002
Religion in the Newsarticle “Missionaries or Not?”
www.crspl@trincoll.depts/csrpl) The women, who described
themselves as “humanitarian workers” were “unpopular with a spectrum of
Kabul aid groups running from secular agencies to fellow Evangelicals,”
Time’s cover story reported. “In their book Prisoners of Hope,
Mercer and Curry wrote of initiating Christian prayer with Muslims, urging
them to listen to evangelical broadcasts (in one case providing the radio)
and showing at least two families a film on Jesus.”

Most of this wave of articles reported that
mission-oriented Protestants have been increasingly preoccupied with the
“10/40 Window,” a slice of the northern hemisphere between the 10th
and the 40th degrees of latitude. The phrase was coined in 1989
by Luis Bush, an Argentine evangelist who, according to Newsday’s
Eisenberg, wanted to bring the light of Christ to “‘billions of impoverished
souls’ who lived in a part of the world that had been largely impervious to
Christianity.”

Indeed, for many evangelicals, the Muslim world is a
wildly frustrating and exciting challenge. “Over the past decade,” Laura
Secord wrote in an excellent Boston Globe survey published April 20,
“Christian missionaries have converted millions of African animists, some
Buddhists in Asia, even Hindus in India. But Muslim communities have proved
notoriously resistant.”

“Christian missions have not
impacted the Muslim world since Islam began,” George Braswell, a former
Baptist missionary in Iran and professor at Southeastern Baptist Theological
Seminary in Wake Forest, told her.

“When people like Franklin Graham publicly insult Islam
this really hurts missionaries on the ground,” said Jonathan Bonk of the
Overseas Mission Studies Center in New Haven, Connecticut (which is aligned
more with mainline than evangelical Protestantism). “It’s not how they see
Islam. It’s a caricature, a parody designed to justify what political
leaders want to do.”

Like it or not, American evangelicals of the 21st
century must recognize that their religion is perceived as political, at
home and abroad. They’re like the British missionaries of the 19th
and early 20th centuries, who suffered and profited from the fact
that Britannia ruled the waves.